For example, this contains the Cambodia story:
To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which
theoretically was off limits, prompting Kerry to send a sarcastic message to his
superiors that he was writing from the Navy's "most inland" unit.
The part about his third Purple Heart and Bronzw Star reads:
A couple of weeks later, on March 13, 1969, a mine detonated near Kerry's boat,
wounding Kerry in the right arm, according to the citation written by Zumwalt.
Guerrillas started firing on the boats from the shoreline. Kerry then realized
that he had lost overboard a Green Beret who is identified only as "Rassman."
"The man was receiving sniper fire from both banks," according to Kerry's
Bronze Star citation from that day. "Lt. Kerry directed his gunners to provide
suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding
and in pain, with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard.
Lt. Kerry then directed his boat to return and assist the other damaged craft
and towed the boat to safety. Lt. Kerry's calmness, professionalism and great
personal courage under fire were in keeping with the highest traditions of the
US Naval Service," Zumwalt's citation said.
Other articles say that the shrapnel wound in Kerry's arm troubled him for years. However, the official report available from Kerry's own web site says "shrapnel in the left buttocks and contusions on his right forearm."
A contusion is a bruise. Was it shrapnel in his butt that was troubling him?
FactCheck.org has this quote:
Kerry's account is in the book Tour of Duty by Douglas Brinkley, who based
it largely on Kerry's own Vietnam diaries and 12 hours of interviews with Kerry.
"I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice-bin explosions
and then we started to move back to the boats," Kerry is quoted as saying on
page 313. In that account, Kerry says his arm was hurt later, after
the mine blast that disabled PCF-3, when a second explosion rocked his own
boat. "The concussion threw me violently against the bulkhead on the door and I
smashed my arm," Kerry says on page 314
This is consistent with the official record.
Where did the shrapnel come from? They were blowing up barges of rice and Kerry was too close and got hit with a fragment from his own grenade (where have we heard that before?)
Again, from FactCheck.org:
The Swift Boat group's affidavits state that the wound in Kerry's backside
happened earlier that day in an accident. "Kerry inadvertently wounded himself
in the fanny," Thurlow said in his affidavit, "by throwing a grenade too close
(to destroy a rice supply) and suffered minor shrapnel wounds."
The grenade incident is actually supported by Kerry's own
account, but the shrapnel wound was only part of the basis for Kerry's
third purple heart according to official documents. The evidence here is
contradictory.
From here it gets murky. You don't get a Purple Heart for a bruise and you don't get one for blowing up enemy supplies unless the enemy is firing back. Kerry seems to have run the two incidents together in his report.
You see, you don't even have to read the Swiftee's book to catch Kerry.
Eric Alterman needs medication. He is convinced that there will be violence at the Republican convension but that it will be caused by right-wing infiltrators.
...with so many people, it can easily get out of hand or be exploited for
nefarious purposes by those on the far-left or far-right—and in the far-right I
include the president and people working for his re-election.
...it hardly requires an act of imagination to prepare for the possibility
that Republican conservative spies and thugs will infiltrate these protests and
cause the violence themselves, with the knowledge that it will be blamed on the
protesters and their cause.
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